Nearly Rs 6.5 crore were dispersed as monthly salaries to ’employees’ of Mumbai police between 2019 and 2020. Six years later, it has come to light that the ’employees’ existed only on paper.
A major financial fraud involving Rs 6.41 crore in payroll records of the Mumbai Police Department surfaced during the migration of employee data from the old salary portal, Sevarth, to a new software platform.
According to a complaint filed by a police officer from the north regional division, ten non-police personnel were frequently listed as employees and received monthly salaries into their bank accounts.
The 10 fictitious names listed in the First Information Report (FIR) are: Ramdas Bhogle, Sudhakar Kadam, Sarju Yadav, Bhagwat Bhosale, Gunaji Khavkar, Mahadev Haldankar, Rajendra Sonar, Uttam Thorat, Suryakant Patil, and Pandurang Kadam.
Unauthorised salary transactions were detected primarily across two timeframes: December 2019 to February 2020, and June to September 2020.
According to the police, officials are clerks at the ministerial level colluded to fabricate attendance registers and records of ghost employees. They allegedly added names of outsiders to the payroll.
A case has been registered against five individuals who held office at the time of the incident. The employees named in the FIR include former administrative officers Ramkishan Goswami, Nagesh Talvadekar, and Vijaya Chavan, along with Head Clerk Ajay Rathod and Senior Clerk Amol Meshram.
The charges include cheating, forgery, breach of trust and criminal conspiracy under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023.
The Mumbai Police Department has suspended Chavan and Meshram following allegations of creating fake Service IDs and Defined Contribution Pension Scheme (DCPS) IDs to process unauthorised salaries.
The two are accused of adding 10 ’employees’ and sanctioning their monthly salaries.
The suspended employees are prohibited from undertaking private employment or trade, must submit regular declarations to claim subsistence allowance, and are barred from leaving the Brihanmumbai jurisdiction without prior official permission.
The police are investigating the identities of the 10 individuals listed as ’employees’ and determining who controlled the bank accounts opened in their names.
Similar payroll data manipulations involving smaller amounts have also been reported in Dhule and Latur districts, prompting senior officials to review overall payroll system vulnerabilities across Maharashtra.
(With inputs from Rizwan Sheikh)
